The week after.

After I've had this last week to think about Powershift, about the protests and telling the government how they need to make business pay up and get us some clean energy, I have had a lot of thoughts. One of the speakers was very interesting, his name was Tim Dechristopher, and you can check out the actual speech on youtube. But he talked about how because of the reliance we have on coal, we are on our way to collapse. Both economically and ecologically, the United States is in big trouble. What happens historically in a collapse, like in Germany or in Darfur, the government doesn’t say “oh, sorry! this is our fault. we’ll figure it out”. Officials refused to give up power and made up lies. So instead, the public chooses a scapegoat. And that scapegoat isn’t going to be the government. It’s going to be gays or muslims or immigrants. His point was that we don’t just have to keep emissions low and use alternative energy. We don’t have to just preserve our earth, but we also have to preserve our humanity. We have to realize that just doing little things individually isn’t going to cut it anymore. He talked about how if we really care about this movement, we have to put aside our jobs and education and family. We have to take action and move beyond our words. I thought what Tim said was awesome. I agree that we have to force our government into a choice between fighting a war against the youth or closing down these unjust corporations. But how long will that take? What level of injustice do we need to see that. When will people stop passively opposing things, but accepting when they happen? Will it be too late when we finally decide to stop just making statements and taking action? Everyday we need people at these mountain top removal sites, costing the companies time and money. But we don’t have that. We don’t have enough people who are willing to do that. But we do have many people who are willing to spend their lives in congress, trying to change official's minds. I realized that both are critically important to make the change we want to see. We need the grassroots activists, doing radical changes through non-violent direct action. But we also need those who are willing to go to congress and tell them why the radicals are doing what they are doing and telling them exactly what we want to see. We all have a common goal, clean energy!! We just need to remember that when we seem divided by our means of achieving that goal.